


Anchoring

by Atticwright



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Death, Drabble, F/M, Fluff, Kinda?, Lich, One Shot, Putting the Romantic in Necromantic, Taking lots liberties with the lore of D&D, anyway that's why it's non-explicit and only rated T, it's lich sex? so not like regular sex but like metaphysical sex?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-04-20
Packaged: 2019-04-25 07:00:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14373417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atticwright/pseuds/Atticwright
Summary: Sometimes when they’re both liches- when they’re both dead- they reminisce about living things.Just two ghouls getting experimental. They are scientists, after all.





	Anchoring

**Author's Note:**

> Listen... when you're in a relationship for many many years, and you're both powerful undead beings, and you find yourself having to kill a lot of time before you can get back in your physical bodies... You try some things, just out of curiosity, right?
> 
> Anyway, this is very sappy and not that sexy at all, but I haven't seen anyone else write about it so I had to fill that void myself. Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading this weird thing!

Sometimes when they’re both liches- when they’re both dead- they reminisce about living things. The greasy comfort food she makes for them on difficult days. Pushing sweaty shoes off feet at the end of a long hike. Plunging backwards into a cool lake during the apex of summer. Their bodies pressed close on a cold night, generating their own heat under the blankets even as the air above chills their noses and cheeks.

“What if we could figure out an equivalent?” she asks one day. They are floating alone in some woods, a couple miles away from where the ship is anchored in the sky. Night fell a few hours before.

“To sex?”

“Yeah. We _can_ sort of feel each other.”

“It’s different.”

They can feel each other’s souls while they’re liches, the way you can feel the force of a magnet repelling another. Bolts of red electricity peel off them whenever their forms convene.

“I mean, we don’t have junk, so it won’t really be _sex_ , I guess. But I want to try something.”

Liches can hold a form that is humanoid, most often skeletal, most certainly ghoulish. Hollow eye sockets, bared teeth, dried, clinging flesh. It’s been years now since they divested themselves of the burden of an afterlife, so at this point she is able to recognize her lover’s face by his square jaw and his broad forehead, even while lacking skin and muscle. But the essence of a lich is that unholy amalgamation of soul and magic- two things that are not truly tangible. The true state of a lich is metaphysical.

They discuss her idea for a moment and, though skeptical, he agrees to try. Letting down their robed forms, their shapes fade and blur, thinning and spreading until reaching an equilibrium that looks like red light behind mist. She can’t feel her arms, or her face, or any part of her now, but that’s not a new sensation. She also feels him, his essence, next to her. Carefully, she extends herself to him and senses him reaching out to her. He feels like: nervousness, excitement, curiosity, comfort, home, love love love. There’s a lick of necrotic energy that crackles across the surface of them as they touch, but this is another familiar facet of lichdom. The scent of it is comfortable now. 

Gently, steadily, she pushes herself past that surface, and he responds in kind.

Her mind starts to blur.

Even in this form, she has a _version_ of her senses. She’s usually aware of the sights and noises around her, even if those signals aren’t being carried to her brain from her eyes and ears. But things go fuzzy now as she sinks into him. The trees, the moon, the wind fall away. Everything goes dark and it feels a little bit like trancing as she is able to hold onto her thoughts, though they are dulled. She focuses on him. His mind is there, still, and he is clinging to her. She feels a flash of uncertainty from him, but it subsides as they level out together. Equilibrium, again. 

After a moment’s pause, she reaches out one more time, deeper. He opens to her and she sends him a signal of reassurance, and he sends it back as well, and as the feeling echoes back to her, she realizes she can hold on to it. She studies it, turns it over, savors it. Then she lets it go. And as she does, he tenderly begins to comb through her, and she lets him, and she pulls him around her, and they twist and give each other things to feel- the gratitude for each other, the joy, the desire, the possessiveness, the fear of loss, every hallmark of the connection deep in them- echoing back and back and back in a slowly building whirlwind, until-

Equilibrium, again. 

It’s warm. If they could be warm. They aren’t thinking with separate thoughts anymore, they realize. The concept of them being two different people is getting vague. But they’ve found something they can both hold onto. It’s something at the very core of them, and it’s warm and small and it glows, and it reminds them of the Light of Creation. They hypothesize, hazily, that this is their anchor. The day they ripped their souls from their own bodies and altered them to create something more powerful than death, they touched each other and focused all their love so that it would be the last thing on their mortal minds before the process began.

The aura of it is strong, stable, and it radiates something akin to euphoria. Some liches anchor themselves with hate, or greed, or a hunger for vengeance. What would those liches find here instead? they wonder.

It’s pleasant. They hold on to it so long that they realize, maybe they forgot how to let go of it. But they don’t mind because time has stopped passing. It’s cozy because they’re blanketed in each other and they’re holding each other and the world is their love and _they_ are their love. Death and life have forgotten them and here they can hide, and rest, and _be-_

It doesn’t take any drastic force to pull them out. The sun rises, and the light falls on them, and suddenly they are awake. She is back in her robed form, and so is he, and they look at each other, disoriented and surprised. She reaches out with two spectral arms and he takes her in his embrace.

“How long-?” she asks.

“All night, I guess,” he responds, quietly.

They float in silence for another few moments, struggling to grasp what they had just experienced. She tries to describe it to herself in words so she can write it into a report later, but she finds it about as hard to absorb as a dream. 

The last waves of that hazy bliss are receding from her mind as they drift back to the ship, still holding each other close. Every once in a while they share a look, but find it almost impossible to say anything about it. Maybe they don’t need to.

She thinks she feels something now, in her core. Something foreign, but not unwelcome. In fact, it seems familiar. 

The next year begins and they are back in their bodies. She still feels it, in her heart. It hurts when he’s away, and feels heavy when he’s dead. Someone more romantic than she might chalk it up to plain heartache, but she knows it wasn’t there before the night they poured their two beings into one. 

Decades later, he awakes in a new body, memories scrubbed into static, with no sense of the last hundred years or how he arrived in this cave. There’s a pile of books and maps on a desk, a folded change of clothes sitting on a mattress, and placed atop the clothing is a coin.

He can feel a weight in his chest. The coin speaks to him and promises that someday, he’ll remember who put it there.


End file.
